8 Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Teams, Instill Confidence, and Raise Morale  

Evolving from being a good manager to being a great leader means learning about ways to elevate your team and bring the best out every member.  It is no easy feat to bring a group of individuals with varying experience, work styles and areas of expertise together to successfully deliver on a common goal, but it is one of the marks of an exceptional leader to make that happen.

Here are a few tips for empowering teams to greatness:

• Provide a framework, goal and guardrails, but then get out of the way.  One of the greatest challenges as a leader is to delegate control and let go of things that still tie back to your area responsibility.  As a team member, the most frustrating elements of working on a project is having the assignment but not the ability to impact it.  By setting ground rules for the project that align with business culture and industry requirements and stating the desired outcome of the project, the leader has provided teams have the structure they need to find a path to completion. The flip side: by staying overly involved in the decisions and tactics, you as the leader become the bottleneck, with the result that you stall progress and fail to grow your team members professionally.
• Give your staff accountability and authority.  There is a natural evolution to autonomy and decision-making for growing professionals.  The early days might start with checking project plans and decisions with a senior member for coaching and mentoring but the ultimate plan should always be to get individual contributors making 100% of the decisions that fall within their job description and projects.  If the team members are not given the authority to make decisions or consistently make the wrong ones, it is a reflection of the wrong team not that you need to take decision-making away from the team.  This is an important point.
• Set outcomes, not timesheets. There are a few industries that are held stringently to billable hours, but for many others, it is the outcome or end result that performance and revenue is evaluated against.  As a leader, if you provide the goal that needs to be hit and then provide flexibility for hours and time worked to achieve that, you will get the best out of your team.  They will appreciate the quieter work weeks that let them get a few personal errands or appointments completed, and they won’t begrudge the weeks that go a bit over because in the end it usually works out.  The best leaders will reward efficiency and productivity, not hours in the office.  Remember time away from the office recharges creativity and motivation.
• Let them figure it out.  No team is perfect, and it is unrealistic to think a long-term working group would perform without some bumps along the way, but avoid the instinct to rush in and solve the problem for them.  If there is a confrontation, work with the individuals to provide them skills to communicate their concerns and to hear the other person out —  but then send them out to give it a try on their own.  Showing them the path resolution without giving them the answers means that you won’t assume the role of referee.
• Build diversity and create opportunities for sharing.  The best teams bring different perspectives, experiences and ideas to the table – so seek people who are unique, different and bring complementary skill sets to the table.  Not only will you generate better outcomes but you will also create a team that can leverage their perspective to educate and elevate the rest of the team. Ways to do this: share in a group potluck, circulate holiday/celebration pictures, and re-live humorous stories from college days – they make the team more enlightened, more empathetic to different perspectives, and all round tighter-knit.
• Celebrate successes – the big and the small.  When you remove yourself from the daily decisions and steps of a project, it is easy to overlook some of the smaller milestones that teams hit that could likely be an indication of a challenge they overcame.  Find opportunities to celebrate, laugh and high-five because those little wins always lead up to the big wins.
• Make the tough calls when you need to.  Hiring mistakes happen, bad attitudes happen, and a mismatch of skills can happen.  Your job as the leader is to not let the team morale suffer by not making the tough call and changes when they are necessary.  Changing team members can impact the team but leaving the wrong worker on the team for too long can break a good team.
• Strive to be unnecessary.  It is one of the scariest notions to think you want to become unnecessary at your job – but if you can build a team that can operate independent of you then you have freed yourself up to tackle other problems and think longer-term.  It means you have hired the right people, given them the right leadership and mentoring, and helped them build the efficiencies that drive great results.  Your role now evolves into coaching the team members, setting goals, and taking the time to celebrate your rock stars.

With hours in the day being limited and corporate “asks” growing by leaps and bounds, it is important to find ways to work more effectively and bring teams to the next level.  In the end, there is nothing more rewarding than building a powerhouse team that delivers exceptional results — and has fun doing it!